We must help our children connect with nature

The lack of direct experience of nature is impoverishing children – and adults
– in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand, says Cassandra
Jardine.

Less than a quarter of children visit a local patch of green weeklyPhoto: ALAMY

By Cassandra Jardine

7:00AM BST 03 Jun 2010

One noise that children are guaranteed to hear this half term is not the cuckoo, or the sound of wind rustling through the trees, but that of parents moaning, "Get off that bloody computer, and play outside." Forceful mums and dads will try loading their "screenagers" in the car to take them for a walk. More certainly would, if they had been reading the new edition of Richard Louv's book, Last Child in the Woods.

Five years ago, when the book was first published, Louv's was the first voice heard in what is becoming a dawn chorus of concern about the way children are deprived of nature. He went so far as to call this disconnect an illness – Nature Deficit Disorder – the symptoms of which include depression, hyperactivity, boredom and loneliness. All of these problems have been increasing, along with obesity rates, as children spend more time either indoors, or in cars, glued to screens and divorced from nature. According to a survey by Natural England, less than a quarter of children (24 per cent) visit a local patch of green weekly, whereas 53 per cent of their parents did.

Louv's concerns were echoed last week by Sir David Attenborough. Speaking at the tenth anniversary of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the presenter of numerous wildlife series lamented the various obstacles – parental fear, health and safety rules, and laws against collecting fossils or wild flowers – that prevent children from "roaming the countryside" in the way that he did eighty years ago, as a child in Leicestershire.

One of those obstacles, it must be said, is the hours that children spend watching his television programmes about nature, which make them feel that they have seen, and know, it all. "I daresay they know more about East African lions and game than they do about foxes," he acknowledges. Entrancing though it is to watch the wildebeest migration or wheeling shoals of sardines, lack of direct experience of nature is impoverishing children – and adults – in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand.

We are profoundly ignorant of our own surroundings. In a recent poll conducted by the Natural History Museum, less than a quarter of Britons could identify a sycamore, two thirds failed to recognise a peacock butterfly, and less than a fifth correctly labelled a frog: they either thought it was its warty relative, the toad, or had no idea at all.

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Such findings are shaming, but they are also worrying. Louv has drawn together all the various strands of research that add up to a mental and physical health disaster not just in the US, where Louv lives, or western Europe. "Worldwide, in 2008, for the first time more people were living in cities than in rural areas," says Louv, who is currently touring Britain. "People are worried about NDD in Nairobi as well as London and Los Angeles."

One of the points Louv makes is that time slows down when we are in nature. We stop and stare, we think about other species, we "bring the confusion of the world to the woods and wash it in the creek"; an organised football game, albeit outdoors, does not meet that need.

Instinctively, we all know that nature does us good. We pay more for houses with good views, hospital patients with a green view from their beds recover more quickly, and joggers who run through parks have been found to feel more restored, less anxious or depressed than those who run burn the same calories in gyms. But, as parents bringing up children in urban environments, we tend to be in such a rush that we forget that even a small amount of exposure to nature is beneficial.

Louv believes that, particularly in the English-speaking world, we are getting the message about nature acting as a natural Ritalin to hyperactive children. Setting up a bird bath, digging a pond in the garden, or growing plants like hollyhocks, which attract butterflies number among the 100 suggestions in his book for helping children connect with nature.

Young ones can be encouraged to walk by following one of the trails recommended by the Ramblers Association, which advises parents to call it an "adventure", not a walk. Sir David Attenborough, president of Butterfly Conservation (www.butterfly-conservation.org), is urging families to take part in next month's Big Butterfly Count, a survey of Britain's best loved insect, which is facing extinction, with seven out of ten species now in decline.

Exciting interest could be as simple as giving a child a camera to photograph wildlife. Or by stepping out of the front door at full moon (the next one is on June 26), just to look, listen and wonder.